well, that's true - the republicans have been much, much better at simplifying their message, and propagating it successfully despite the vast chasm between the message and the reality.

which means liberals somehow have to find a way to a) simplify their own message and b) get people to pay attention to the 'liar, liar, pants on fire!' response to the republican message._________________aka: neverscared!

On the other hand, many of the policies the liberals stand for aren't that hard to start with and they can't even sell these._________________attitude of a street punk, only cutting selected words out of context to get onself excuse to let one's dirty mouth loose

Well, there are two significant things to take from this. First, he told his people to tone it down. I'm less than optimistic that things will actually change at Fox, but it's a start.

Second, the president of Fox News acknowledged that they represent one side of the political spectrum. To my knowledge they had maintained their supposed unbiased "fair and balanced" claims until now._________________Moo.

What American liberals really need is the same media and political savvy as Republicans--which includes ruthlessness and balls, but it also includes simplifying their message. The Republicans can sell themselves as the party of fiscal responsibility even though they have all the fiscal responsibility of a sixteen-year-old because they are better than liberals at manipulating the media to lend them the impression that they are fiscally responsible.

This is pretty spot on, I think. How quickly did the death panels rumor spread, despite the fact that it was about as far from the truth as you could get? It didn't matter because they kept repeating themselves - drag Grandma in front of a death panel, drag Grandma in front of a death panel - and by the time the left made any concerted effort to rebut it the public had heard the lie a thousand times, and even people who didn't believe it at first had started to believe it. Because surely they couldn't get away with saying it for so long if it weren't true...

One major problem is that the left is far more fractured than the right. The GOP ideological spectrum is much narrower, making it easier to lead members to act together. Olympia Snowe, a Republican Senator, has complained about this, as she's possibly the only moderate Republican left in the Senate (or at least the only one with name recognition) and has said she often feels pushed out. The Democrats are a kind of big tent, stretching the gulf between Blue Dogs and Dennis Kucinich. We have Republican Lite through hardcore communist, which makes getting consensus impossible, and getting everyone to vote as a bloc even harder (seriously). So, Democrats never present that united front that Republicans do. Ideologically, I think it's a good thing, but practically it cuts them off at the knees pretty frequently._________________"Worse comes to worst, my people come first, but my tribe lives on every country on earth. I’ll do anything to protect them from hurt, the human race is what I serve." - Baba Brinkman

But chances are that Loughner’s motives will prove as irreducibly complex as those of most of his predecessors in assassination. Violence in American politics tends to bubble up from a world that’s far stranger than any Glenn Beck monologue — a murky landscape where worldviews get cobbled together from a host of baroque conspiracy theories, and where the line between ideological extremism and mental illness gets blurry fast.

...

When our politicians and media loudmouths act like fools and zealots, they should be held responsible for being fools and zealots. They shouldn’t be held responsible for the darkness that always waits to swallow up the unstable and the lost.

It's like he listened to Mike Savage and Jim Justice on the radio and then wrote an op-ed repeating their arguments. Human motivations are too complex! We can't say violent rhetoric leads to violence... and even if we can there's no direct link to any particular rhetoric so this isn't a problem at all!. Toss in some references to liberals using violent imagery (I've yet to see any mention of a liberal carrying an automatic rifle outside a conservative rally...), talk about how actually some assassins are *gasp!* liberals and Bob's your uncle, nothing to see here, go back to your regularly scheduled hatefest with a clear conscience.

Too bad it's bullshit._________________"Worse comes to worst, my people come first, but my tribe lives on every country on earth. I’ll do anything to protect them from hurt, the human race is what I serve." - Baba Brinkman

My new pet conspiracy theory is that No Child Left Behind was really implemented in order to produce a new batch of mentally stunted kids, adolescents, and young adults ready to be brainwashed by right-wing rhetoric.

By Jove, I think he's got it!

It gives me comfort to imagine it's being done purposefully as part of a larger plot as opposed to it happening inadvertently._________________...if a single leaf holds the eye, it will be as if the remaining leaves were not there.http://about.me/omardrake

I think what bemuses me more than anything is how none of the conversations around this at all have mentioned how the law can allow a person of questionable mental capacity at this level to own and possess a firearm in the first place.

That sort of debate is going on in the comments and message boards, and in people's houses or workplaces. I doubt any actual legislators are going to make a case out of it until some times has passed so they don't come off looking like vultures preying off this tragedy, and until it becomes a policy issue there's really nothing for the news to say about it. However, you can bet the right wing pundits are already gearing up defensively and poisoning the well before anybody even makes it an official issue.

Which is properly shit. The UK, in my memory, had ONE major gun issue before we tightened up, and we were tightened up to fuck before that, compared to the US. Obviously.

well, sarah palin obviously read glenn reynold's article - she's complaining that criticism of her is 'blood libel'. obviously, she was completely ignorant of the meaning before -hopefully it will now bite her firmly on the ass (not that any of her other stupid statements have shut her up). worth a read, for standard radical-right self-justification: we aren't responsible for the acts of a single crazy person, we were just exercising our first amendment rights, and besides, all that stuff about arming ourselves really meant something else, and ending by wrapping herself firmly in the flag. and there are a slew of harpies backing her up. michelle malkin was her usual sweet self:

Quote:

“The blamestream media is already up in arms — can we still say that? — over the use of the phrase ‘blood libel,’” Ms. Malkin wrote. “The more moronic of Palin-bashers will simply gnash their teeth because she said ‘blood.’ Idiocracy: The new normal.”

palin mentions people "respectfully exercising their first amendment rights", but it's hard to see shouting someone down and making death threats as 'respectful'._________________aka: neverscared!

Palin will respectfully exercise her second amendment rights up in your face if you don't start voting the way she wants you to vote. ... I'm sorry, did that sound wrong? It's merely the respectful exercising of first amendment rights. Don't criticize me or you're ignoring the Constitution. P.S. I take no responsibility for anyone who may actually put a gun in your face._________________"Worse comes to worst, my people come first, but my tribe lives on every country on earth. I’ll do anything to protect them from hurt, the human race is what I serve." - Baba Brinkman

First photos of Gabrielle Giffords released
The first photos of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords since she was shot in the head in a mass shooting in Tucson about five months ago were released early Sunday.

By P.K. Weis, AP
Most recent photo of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords since she was shot was released Sunday. She's shown with her mother, Gloria Giffords.
Her staff provided two photographs to The Arizona Republic and also planned to share the images with theArizona Daily Starand on Giffords' Facebook page. According to her staff, the decision to share them was made by Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly, who hope the photos will help Giffords avoid the glare of camera lenses when she begins outpatient therapy later this month.
The goal was to satisfy "public curiosity about her appearance," said C.J. Karamargin, Giffords' communications director. "We want to avoid a paparazzi situation."
The photographs were taken on May 17 in the hours before Giffords' cranioplasty surgery by P.K. Weis of SouthwestPhotoBank.com, who photographed Giffords in the garden of the Houston rehab hospital where she is recovering. Weis, the former photo editor of the Tucson Citizen, is also Giffords' friend and said the photos were not altered....

Let's Just Go Ahead And Assume We've Learned The Lessons Of The Gabrielle Giffords Shooting

On Jan. 8, 2011, we as a society were shocked and dismayed when 19 people, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, a Democratic congresswoman from Arizona's 8th District, were shot during a public meeting outside a local supermarket. Six people were killed and Rep. Giffords suffered a near-fatal head wound. In the wake of this national tragedy, there seemed to be a clarion call to have an open dialogue about gun control, a thoughtful conversation about the way this country treats its mentally ill, and a long overdue discussion about the consequences of overly inflammatory political rhetoric.

Well, seeing as I haven't heard so much as a word about any of those topics in the past three months, I'm going to go ahead and assume that at some point we thoroughly explored those complex issues, resolved them, and are now living our lives based on the lessons we learned from the in-depth conversations I assume we had.

After all, if the crucial, imperative questions raised by this shooting—and there were many—hadn't been satisfactorily answered, we'd still be discussing them, right? The violence was far too brutal and the loss of life far too tragic for the American people to treat the Arizona shooting like any other news event that consumes the country for a brief moment and is then virtually forgotten. So let's just say that we handled the tragedy with the sophistication it deserved. Let's say that we heeded the call for national unity and are as united today as we were five months ago; that the unspeakable violence left an indelible impression on all of us; that Congress came together and is currently working diligently on landmark gun control legislation; and that we are now living in a new era of mutual understanding. Can we do that?

If so, that would be great. Because after all, if we had just brushed aside the life-altering assassination attempt of a congresswoman, as well as the death of a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl without seizing the opportunity to address our nation's glaring problems, then all the shooting victims would have died in vain, and all 300 million of us would be irresponsible, superficial hypocrites with the attention spans of newborns.

That is why I am going to go ahead and say that we gave ourselves a good hard look in the mirror and opened up a desperately needed national dialogue on the legality of guns with 30-round magazine clips. We also had, I'm sure, a productive discussion as to whether or not states allocate enough money toward the identification and treatment of the mentally ill. I wasn't present for either of these dialogues and I never really saw or heard anyone engage in them, but I'm sure they happened. They must have. These questions were far too important to ignore and we, as responsible citizenry, completely understood that, let's just say.

After all, Jared Lee Loughner, whose name I'm going to assume readers of this editorial didn't forget because he was at the epicenter of every single news story for two straight weeks, opened fire on innocent U.S. citizens who were simply taking part in the democratic process. Husbands were widowed, parents lost their children, senior citizens were murdered. This shocking event ripped at the very fabric of our country, and instead of just forgetting about it when the news vans packed up and left, honest discussions about the consequences of deceitful political rhetoric that deliberately preys on people's fears persisted. Further, a responsible conclusion was reached, and our nation's leaders agreed that this kind of inciting, sinister language would stop forever.

That's what we should all agree happened. Please.

We should also just agree that members of Congress sat together at the State of the Union address after the shooting, not just as a publicity stunt, but as a true display of unity that I'm going to assume continues to this very day as they work together on deficit reduction, clean energy, and the economy. And I am willing to bet that, although I don't remember this happening, President Obama gave a rousing speech about gun control even though he knew it wasn't politically viable to do so. Because in a situation such as this, what probably happened was that someone as thoughtful as our president realized politics as usual should be thrown out the window.

And let's not forget Ms. Giffords herself. With all the media attention centered on her recovery, people haven't forgotten, I'm sure, why she is recovering in the first place. There was a deep, festering problem in this country that exploded on Jan. 8, a problem that involved not just political discord, but a growing distrust for our political leaders that had been propagated by irresponsible media personalities and by elected officials themselves. Throw in race, the lagging economy, and an overall feeling of national disunity, and you have a complex situation that desperately needed to be resolved.

For Gabrielle Gifford's sake, let's just assume that it was, okay?

So, yeah. It was. Good.

This is the strongest, most comprehensive commentary I could find. Articles about Gifford's recovery don't mention any of the issues surrounding the shooting.

What the fuck America.

PS Loughner likely to stand trial eventually He isn't mentally competent yet._________________Before God created Las he pondered on all the aspects a woman might have, he considered which ones would look good super-inflated and which ones to leave alone.
After much deliberation he gave her a giant comfort zone. - Michael